The Social Justice Centre

The establishment of a Social Justice Centre, based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, greatly adds to our capacity for conducting social justice action and community and service-based learning. It helps act as a learning lab and service-learning potential for our class-based, practicum, and co-op courses.

— Social Justice Centre KPU

The Social Justice Centre is an initiative of the Department of Criminology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The initiative focuses on developing a Kwantlen-based centre to function as an umbrella organization and local incubator for community advocacy and civic change. The Social Justice Centre is comprised of local civil society stakeholders, municipal partners, service delivery agencies, student groups, faith groups, and university faculty. Some of the activities of the centre include (but are not limited to): harm reduction, anti-racism, human rights, environmental advocacy, sex/gender, surveillance, freedom of information, disability rights, anti-poverty, housing, law, food security, immigrant resettlement, restorative justice, decolonizing education, public safety and corrections.

The Social Justice Centre enhances the local community and university capacity of Surrey/Richmond for social justice. It grew out of the work of a core group of criminology instructors who had an interest in developing innovative approaches to incorporating community-based research and learning into all levels of its curriculum. The project affords us the opportunity to develop new avenues for academic and student involvement. The Social Justice Centre greatly adds to our capacity for conducting social justice action and community and service-based learning. It helps act as a learning lab and service-learning potential for our class-based, practicum, and co-op courses.

Members

Alana Abramson

Alana has almost 20 years experience in the field of restorative justice as a researcher, practitioner, and educator. She has trained hundreds of restorative justice facilitators in Canada and currently supports and consults for new and existing programs. Alana has extensive experience working directly with people involved with crime and conflict both in community and prison settings. She helped to develop the first set of restorative justice practice standards in BC and was the 2016 recipient of the Liz Elliott Restorative Justice award from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. Alana has applied her knowledge and skills to help support various initiatives including those supporting elders and at-risk adults, people with disabilities, Indigenous communities, youth, former prisoners, and victim/survivors. As a passionate community advocate for social justice through dialogue and education, Alana has organized many events and conferences drawing a wide-ranging audience. Alana is a full-time faculty member in Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, coordinator for the Alternatives to Violence Project, and volunteer with Kamloops Restorative Justice, BC Bereavement Society and the Interior Restorative Justice Network.

alana.abramson@kpu.ca

Seema Ahluwalia

Seema Ahluwalia has been a member of the KPU Department of Sociology for over 25 years, contributing to governance, curriculum and program development, and teaching innovation. Seema's teaching, scholarship and activism is focused on racialized domination and dehumanization, decolonization, genocide, and the implementation of Indigenous models of peaceful co-existence.

Carroll Boydell is a faculty member in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her research interests are varied and include homelessness, access to legal aid in BC, and factors that contribute to injustices and wrongful convictions in the criminal justice system.

Irina Ceric is a faculty member in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is an editor of Interface: a journal for and about social movements and a member of the Terminal City Legal Collective. Her research is grounded in the intersections of social movements, critical legal theory, and radical lawyering.

Greg Chan teaches writing, diasporic literature, and film studies in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where he also directs the Community Outreach program for the KDocs Documentary Film Festival and edits the film studies journal, Mise-en-scene. His research focuses on social justice through documentary activism and digital storytelling. Greg is proud to be the son of a refugee who survived internment in India.

Dr. Wade Deisman is Associate Dean of Arts at KPU and a member of The Department of Criminology. His research interests range from an unabashed fascination with all things theoretical to a more substantive focus on policing, law, technology, and security. Before completing his Ph.D., he worked for the Mayor’s Task Force on Safer Cities in Edmonton, the Atlantic Institute of Criminology in Halifax, and Law Commission of Canada in Ottawa.

Wade.Deisman@kpu.ca

Kegan Doyle

Kegan Doyle teaches writing and American literature and film in Kwantlen's English Department. He runs Kwantlen's Humanities 101 program, through the Phoenix Society, an addiction recovery centre in Surrey. He's passionate about transportation issues and is committed to bringing Vision Zero to the GVRD.

Andrew Frank teaches in the Environmental Protection and Public Relations departments at KPU. His research interests include environmental communication, public deliberation and conflict resolution, and he advises Indigenous leaders and conservation groups on communications strategy. A settler Canadian of mixed Scottish, English and Irish origin, Andrew supports restitution for Indigenous nations, and over time, he hopes to contribute to reconciliation.

Dr. Lisa Freeman is a faculty member in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her research and advocacy focuses on the interplay between law, regulation, and urban governance in terms of affordable housing, municipal law, the suburbanization of poverty, and pubic/private space (including public libraries).

Jennifer Hardwick is a faculty member in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is interested in the impact that stories (both told and untold) have on identity, power structures, and community. In particular, she focuses on how communities mobilize stories to speak back to injustice, build relationships, heal, and assert identity.

jennifer.hardwick@kpu.ca

Gurpreet Johal

Gurpreet Singh Johal is a faculty member in the Department of Criminology at KPU.

His research interests explore the politics of racialization and criminalization. Specifically he explores how various aspects of the Canadian state have operationalized categories of racialized identity in the service of liberal capitalist hegemonies.

He is interested in intersectional modes of analysis which draw upon critical research methods, community based inquiry and social movements devoted to decolonization and decarceration.

gurpreet.johal@kpu.ca

Mike Larsen

Mike Larsen is a faculty member in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His research and advocacy work deals with freedom of information, government secrecy, and privacy rights, and with public education related to these issues.

Tara Lyons, PhD is a faculty member in the Department of Criminology at KPU. She is also a research scientist with the Gender and Sexual Health Initiative (http://www.gshi.cfenet.ubc.ca/). She conducts community-driven research in the areas of gender, sexuality, sex work, drug use and violence.

Michael C.K. Ma is a faculty member in the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, British Columbia. He works in the area of social justice, community advocacy, anti-racism, and harm reduction.

Larissa Petrillo is passionate about social and cultural change, cross-cultural communication, research ethics, indigenous knowledge, community-based conservation. At KPU, she is a member in the Anthropology Department and is the founder and Coordinator of the NGO and Nonprofit Studies program. She began community service learning projects with her students in the Foundations program at UBC, and, since then, at KPU, has served as the Director of CIR:CLE (The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research: Community Learning Engagement) and as the Teaching Fellow in Experiential Learning, running community engaged projects with a number of partners.

Hisham M. Ramadan, S.J.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, British Columbia. He works in the area of social justice, Islamic Law, Islamic Political Theory, Criminal Law, comparative law and Human rights.

Hisham.ramadan@kpu.ca

Jason Ramsey

Dr. Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at KPU. His research focuses on cultural constructions of space, threat, and marginality in Mexico and British Columbia.

jason.ramsey@kpu.ca

Asma Sayed

Dr. Asma Sayed is a faculty member in the Department of English at KPU. Sayed is trained in human rights issues, and her interdisciplinary research and social activism focuses on marginalization of gendered and racialized people and violence against women represented in literature, film, and media. Her publications include five books and numerous articles in periodicals, anthologies, and academic journals. She has served as adviser on various boards and NGOs including Indo-Canadian Women’s Association, Changing Together: A Centre for Immigrant Women, and Canadian Communications Foundation.

asma.sayed@kpu.ca

Jeff Shantz

Jeff Shantz is a writer, poet, photographer, artist, and activist who has decades of community organizing experience within social movements and as a rank-and-file workplace activist. He currently teaches social justice, critical theory, state and corporate crime, and community advocacy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Metro Vancouver, Canada. He is project lead on Anti-Poverty/Criminalization/Social War Policing at the Social Justice Center in Surrey, British Columbia (Unceded Coast Salish territories). See:

Shantz is the author of numerous books, including Crisis States: Governance, Resistance, and Precarious Capitalism(Punctum 2016), Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid beyond Communism (Punctum, 2013), Green Syndicalism: An Alternative Red/Green Vision (Syracuse University Press, 2012), and Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructures of Resistance (Ashgate, 2010). Shantz is co-founder of the Critical Criminology Working Group (http://www.radicalcriminology.org/) and founding editor of the journal Radical Criminology (http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc). Samples of his writings can be found at jeffshantz.ca. Follow on twitter @critcrim.

Greg Simmons is a faculty member in the Criminology partment at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His research and advocacy centre on green criminology, ecological justice and corporate and elite crime.

Katie Warfield is faculty in the department of Journalism and Communication Studies. She is also director of the Visual Media Workshop, a research and learning center on digital visual culture. Her interests lie at the intersections of feminist posthumanism, post-phenomenology, digital literacy, and visual culture.